beka valentine

trans dyke hacking on @[email protected] . she/her (xey/xem or ey/em if you're bored with binaries); no child zone, 18+ only 

current twitter handle: @[email protected] 

former twitter handles: @beka_valentine @illegally_beka

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npub1dedkf2flnstav55fz9y9uwvu30srv8zs9c78xm5prruwqrv4p5xqd6j93d

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[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxukmy4ylec97k22y3zjz78xwghcpkr3gzu0rnd6q3378qpk2s6rqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7892ka

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1dedkf2flnstav55fz9y9uwvu30srv8zs9c78xm5prruwqrv4p5xqd6j93d

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Last Notes

2026-05-04 18:36:23 CEST

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personally, I love the dry brushed/sponged look, and have spent the last few days making shaders to replicate it, but YMMV on what you like and want out of a scifi environment

2026-04-08 20:46:54 CEST

the TACO assholes won. the ceasefire is gone. Democrats got what they wanted: continued war with Iran

2026-04-05 20:00:48 CEST

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@nprofile…jwpj but also, VPL's work was almost entirely inaccessible as well

2026-04-05 19:23:48 CEST

its kind of frustrating that the VR scene of the 1990s produced basically 0 books about their adventures in creating the future, because they kind had no soul and no vision

2026-04-03 07:22:03 CEST

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@nprofile…pklk who do i look like, nikola tesla?

2026-04-03 07:20:52 CEST

gonna invent magsafe wall power plug

2026-04-03 05:51:02 CEST

OH | I was very drunk, but I was told after the fact that my dancing, while very WHITE, was not offensive

2026-04-02 10:42:42 CEST

earthquake in SF!

2026-04-01 18:23:25 CEST

i have NEVER encountered a 3D printer that was anywhere NEAR as fussy and high-maintenance as the Bambu X-1 Carbon. it's wonderfully fast and consistent when it works well, which is most of the time, but every once in a while it just shits the bed

2026-04-01 09:24:30 CEST

Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor? amazing. he looks really different, and plays an American, it's very weird

2026-04-01 08:19:39 CEST

For All Mankind is a good show, I quite enjoy it, but it's full of shit I don't care about, like all the human drama
i want competency porn, not nonsense about Karen fucking her dead son's best friend who's now a 19 year old dipshit and how he's so in love with her. i don't care

2026-04-01 03:26:21 CEST

as someone who wears glasses, i find VR headsets to be immensely frustrating bc i have to wear them inside the headset. are there any with adjustable lenses????

2026-03-29 21:55:35 CEST

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you don't care about the thing, the thing is just a means to an end for you
but thats not interesting, there's no challenges there, nor story, no compelling anything
its boring parasitism

2026-03-29 21:54:52 CEST

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no one cares about how you thought it was a really foolish move to turn down an acquisition offer from IBM, because after all if IBM bought the company you could retire and never have to work on this shit ever again!

2026-03-29 21:52:59 CEST

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this actually reminds me of that book about timesharing that i read
almost entirely about the managerial business bullshit, and nothing about the technology, the challenges, the hurdles

2026-03-29 21:50:31 CEST

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"it just devolved into games, and that's whats happening again today! the stupid users just don't understand why our failed ideas were actually superior!"

2026-03-29 21:48:22 CEST

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"oh you know i had to explain to these russian guys that the way to do a startup in silicon valley is you sell to a big company and then ditch and do it again and make more money"
your companies are continuously failing b/c you're not focused on making a good piece of tech

2026-03-29 21:47:08 CEST

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you get comments like "oh, you know, you have to learn that it cant just be brands making content for the metaverse, it has to be people AND brands, collaborating on things"
capitalist brained dipshits. no one likes brands you parasite

2026-03-29 21:46:00 CEST

listening to a podcast about the VRML boom of the 90s and man some of these guys are dipshit parasites

2026-03-29 21:45:01 CEST

listening to a podcast about the VRML boom of the 90s and man some of these guys are dipshit parasites

2026-03-29 21:01:38 CEST

"A Narrative Analysis of Deus Ex"
no, this is not an analysis, this is an in depth and long winded explanation of the plot points

2026-03-29 07:58:36 CEST

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the same mechanism for progressive enhancement also gives us options for genre variance simply by making different choices of how to elaborate the details

2026-03-29 07:57:35 CEST

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there are many ways to cache these things out, and which specific ways we pick would depend on the kind of world we're envisioning. is a fantasy setting? a scifi setting? a historically accurate setting? all have different options

2026-03-29 07:56:30 CEST

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you can move with or without the use of a tool to assist you in that. without a tool you could do it by walking, running, hopping, etc. with a tool maybe you're using a boat, or a pogo stick, or a teleporter

2026-03-29 07:55:10 CEST

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we can also vary what options exist for increasing the detail, because there may be many ways to buy something, actually
well, perhaps not so much for buying, but consider moving. the abstract concept of moving can be made more precise in many ways

2026-03-29 07:53:46 CEST

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we can treat it like its an atomic concept with no structure, and a simulation can make use of it. its just some magical thing that happens and thats that
but we can later on add some decomposition options to enrich the simulation, like adding more levels of detail to a mesh

2026-03-29 07:52:27 CEST

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something else that this approach seems to enable is progressive enhancement and modular extensibility consider for instance that if we have a very ab

2026-03-29 04:47:08 CEST

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i don't care if the random people on the street have anything going on in their lives at all, my attention and focus isn't on them so they can be low behavior resolution
but the people im going to have to interact with heavily for the stuff im doing? yeah that needs detail

2026-03-29 04:45:39 CEST

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does J. Random NPC need to have their daily routine simulated down to eating breakfast? absolutely not
does the target of an assassination job need that? probably! if poison is an option!

2026-03-29 04:44:48 CEST

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if you want to have the player engaged in some interesting events, it's probably very valuable to simulate them down to a level where the player can jump in to interact, whereas we don't need to simulate every NPC's life just to make the world feel inhabited

2026-03-29 04:43:41 CEST

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im sure there are lots of other cues for expansion, but another important one is probably whether or not you're abstractly simulating things for making a world feel inhabited, vs. simulating things to generate specific kinds of interesting narratives for the player

2026-03-29 04:36:06 CEST

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if you're present to witness some spatial events, thats a reason to flesh out the detail to expose those spatial events to portray
but if you're not present, there's no reason to flesh them out, kind of like in 3d mesh LOD

2026-03-29 04:33:20 CEST

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and so, since that involves something happening at a location, and movement through space, of various things, then a cue for the option to expand the detail is the presence of the player in the same space as those spatial phenomena

2026-03-29 04:32:01 CEST

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and there are some ways we might want to cue up some details to flesh out
for instance, many of these things require some kind of simultaneous presence
i can't hand something to you which you then grab without us both being present at the same time

2026-03-29 04:30:43 CEST

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its not strictly speaking necessary to flesh out the details of how the purchase takes place, we CAN, if we want, leave it completely abstracted, and that's very easy to model
but if we want to, we can also flesh out the details

2026-03-29 04:29:28 CEST

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and what's interest here is that each time we expand something into more sub-events, we get both lower level, more generic, and more detailed in what the world looks like
but we don't HAVE to make any expansion moves at all

2026-03-29 04:27:28 CEST

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maybe you could say something like "expand the elbow joint to angle Theta degrees" or something, and that's about it, tho that level of detail is probably better managed outside this system by some IK stuff probably

2026-03-29 04:26:23 CEST

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each of these events can be fleshed out into more and more detail, more and more sub-events
and eventually at some low level, such as this one, you can't really break things down much farther, if at all
i mean, its hard to decompose "extend your arm to this position" more

2026-03-29 04:23:39 CEST

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but what does it mean to do _that_?
well you grab the money, pull it away from the wallet, hold out your hand, they extend their hand, grab the money, you release your hand, they retract their hand...
you get the idea

2026-03-29 04:22:41 CEST

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and those sub-events can be broken down do. what does it mean to give someone some money? well you take out the money from your wallet, and hold it out to them, and they take it from you and put it in the register

2026-03-29 04:21:31 CEST

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there's no strict implication of ordering here so it can happen sort of.. whatever, give or take, but of course for various reasons it often happens in specific time and place bounded ways

2026-03-29 04:20:30 CEST

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but the most common way to actually do a purchase, with some more concrete details added in, is to say that the purchase is fleshed out with some sub-events:
Buyer gives Payment Amount to Seller
Seller gives Bought Item to Buyer

2026-03-29 04:19:11 CEST

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maybe you go up to a vending machine and press a button, and when you do, your wallet is deducted, while your inventory has the new item added
or if you're in a multi-character setting, maybe there is an actual abstract item in someone elses inventory that moves to yours, etc

2026-03-29 04:17:51 CEST

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while after the purchase, Buyer has Bought Item, and Seller has Payment Amount
and at an abstract level that is what it means to buy something
and we can imagine that that's all there is to buy something. many video games have that exact structure, even

2026-03-29 04:16:21 CEST

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so lets imagine a high level description of a purchase. we might say that it looks something like this:
There is a Buyer, a Seller, a Bought Item, and a Payment Amount
and before the purchase, Buyer has Payment Amount, and Seller has Bought Item

2026-03-29 04:14:14 CEST

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and i think i have some rough idea. ill use a simple example here to convey it tho: a purchase in a shop. that's situation familiar to people from games and from real life, so we have lots of intuitions around how it works in games and reality

2026-03-29 04:12:36 CEST

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and that got me thinking: what would it take to be able to simulate a world at such that those sorts of consequences are _possible_, but where the lowest level details aren't strictly speaking necessary?

2026-03-29 04:11:39 CEST

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no blacksmith = no iron goods = no scythes and horseshoes
and my usual take on how to make that sort of thing feasible is to just say "simulate it all!"
which i think is somewhat correct, to be sure, in that it would work, but also it's a LOT of work to simulate all of that

2026-03-29 04:10:24 CEST

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her example that motivated this was a Skyrim-like situation but where you want to say that if you kill the blacksmith in a town, there are consequences, such as people not being able to get their horses shod, or not being able to harvest, because they can't get iron products

2026-03-29 04:08:56 CEST

i was chatting with a friend the other day about some VR stuff, and one topic that came up in the context of making game engines for richly interactive simulated worlds was the issue of level of detail for non-mesh phenomena, specifically behavioral phenomena

2026-03-28 18:01:31 CET

new video time!
Recreating the VPL DataGlove, Part 1: Introduction
This video contains a brief introduction to VPL Research, and then a more in depth discussion of the bend sensor technology used in the DataGlove to detect and measure finger bending.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rz6tX2G2n8

2026-03-26 07:15:30 CET

leftists who want to scrap Section 230 are fascist collaborators and should be beaten to a pulp

2026-03-26 01:17:16 CET

why the fuck is there a military jet without a call sign screaming over SF

2026-03-25 23:52:28 CET

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but 3d modelling software for creative purposes is mostly mesh specific tools that have a complete disconnect from both mechanical design, and from productive tools
not ENTIRELY, mind you, but enough so that it's.. weird. it's its own skill with its own peculiarities

2026-03-25 23:50:45 CET

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and historically, if you're not going to make drafting docs for your manufactured objects, then you just wing it with the prototype until it feels right, and then template that out where possible, or recreate it by hand from the reference model, or whatever

2026-03-25 23:49:21 CET

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maybe you make a miniature mockup, sculpted out of clay, but then you're using clay modelling tools
or if you do a CAD design, you have CAD-level tools that don't care about meshes usually

2026-03-25 23:48:27 CET

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like, if you're just sketching things, without consideration to production, that's fine, but no one 3D sketches. and when you physically make anything 3D, you're inherently creating using tools specific to the process

2026-03-25 23:46:55 CET

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and like.. a large amount of how physical objects are designed is either constrained by the material considerations of manufacturing, or made with tools intended for higher levels of structure

2026-03-25 23:45:28 CET

an interesting thing about designing and modelling 3D objects is that for creative settings, the tools for creating are mostly fairly low level mesh oriented tools, rather than something oriented to a higher level of representation

2026-03-25 23:13:56 CET

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@nprofile…ted5 ah ok. its on a modern site so i wasnt sure if it was a modernized vintage page, or a modern page

2026-03-25 22:17:01 CET

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@nprofile…ted5 when did that class run?

2026-03-25 22:16:11 CET

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and as always, authoring capabilities for VRML were terrible because no one has really cracked that nut even today, and doing it squeezed through a keyboard and mouse is hard
but even so, there's still things that can be done which make it better

2026-03-25 22:15:18 CET

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2026-03-25 22:12:26 CET

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that's not to say that it makes a compelling case internally, but at least there's a clear sense that you can use the tool to create interesting things you might want to look at
way better than anything in the VRML book

2026-03-25 22:10:13 CET

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now, i do get that this book is a technical introduction to VRML, but its hard to pick it up and feel like this is something worth spending time on
whereas the VRML sourcebook for VRML 2.0 at least throws a weird alien world on the cover to entice you

2026-03-25 22:08:26 CET

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Jaron Lanier had the good sense to pitch VPL's work on VR by making appeals to human creativity and expression, which is at least an open ended invitation to fill in the blanks with compelling ideas

2026-03-25 22:07:16 CET

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its not just VRML, but VRML is the easiest thing to point to
these same people are still around, and were pushing the metaverse a few years back, with painfully similar schlocky pitches
no one cares about ~commerce~
you won't attract people with that as your pitch

2026-03-25 22:06:08 CET

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and its an interesting contrast to the incredible imagination behind hypermedia that existed from the mid 80s through the mid 90s, and the web from the mid 90s on, and video games for forever

2026-03-25 22:04:59 CET

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now look, sure, i get it. it's early days of VRML, from 1994 to 1997, but even through to the late 90s or early 2000s, you'd be hard pressed to find VRML content that was in any way compelling. the imagination for what it could be was just.. boring and bland and schlocky

2026-03-25 22:00:10 CET

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now, given that these are static things, not dynamic, interactive environments, its hard to find any of this compelling on its own
VRML 1.0 didn't even have animations and such, so you couldn't even make little characters that did stuff. that came in VRML 2.0 / VRML97

2026-03-25 21:58:58 CET

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the aforementioned track light is described somewhere in source but never even shown

2026-03-25 21:57:43 CET

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a blank building exterior with a bench and lamp
a studio apartment with furniture and kitchen
a banana
a stair case with 3d text as buttons
a computer lab
an abstract architectural space
an abstract representation of SQL
a molecule
a slot machine
South Beach in SF

2026-03-25 21:52:33 CET

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here's a list of example objects/spaces in the book, in order:
an AR15
a hexagon
some squiggle writing
the VRML logo
the planet earth
the New College vrmLab
a cube
an orrery (consistently mispelled as orrey)
a strange building interior that's described as a "stock ticker"

2026-03-25 21:47:40 CET

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what i mean by that is like.. the things imagined are so boring and schlocky. the mythos around the motivation for VRML is all like.. William Gibson's Matrix, or Neal Stephenson's Metaverse, but the canonical examples are stupid
like, one example given is a track light
whoopie

2026-03-25 21:46:13 CET

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reading through the VRML book that Mark Pesce wrote, i feel like there's a real sense of .. not having much to say with VRML
i think this was an eternal problem, partially due to VRML's static nature, but even then i think it's not logically impossible to say stuff

2026-03-25 21:36:06 CET

VRML 1.0 is a truly weird language. not sure if this is carried through to later versions and its descendants but, wow what a strange language

2026-03-25 19:41:37 CET

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like obviously the simplified should show a subset of all, so yeah, not the same options
but it doesn't. it's not a subset. simplified settings include things that are just not available in all settings
what

2026-03-25 19:40:34 CET

VLC is so stupid. its preferences have a simple vs all toggle but these two interfaces do NOT show the same options. lmfao. braindead

2026-03-25 19:27:17 CET

are there any good android/etc device managers for linux, which are user friendly like iTunes used to be?

2026-03-25 17:33:19 CET

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@nprofile…97y5 more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigaette! your T-Zone will tell you! T for Taste, T for Throat!
https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/for-your-throat/t-zone/#collection-7

2026-03-25 05:36:35 CET

Sonique's It Feels So Good is such a great song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ZaxGR21sc

2026-03-25 04:10:13 CET

Sadeness, by Enigma, is such a quintessentially 90s song, holy moly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4maoo4A3x4

2026-03-24 06:58:51 CET

let's be serious here. these new Star Trek shows do not need significant time to grow a fan base, because they NEVER grow a fan base even when given the time
DISCO's 5th season was 1/6th as widely viewed as Fallout's FIRST season
they're just bad shows

2026-03-24 01:27:16 CET

new videos!
Chicago Screws - Bind paper, make hinges and rotary axles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yN0b-eil7o

2026-03-22 18:54:17 CET

@nprofile…4wfp have you heard eire og's sam song?

2026-03-21 08:47:53 CET

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@nprofile…4xv8 im not saying it happens to literally no one, but it's very rare

2026-03-21 08:27:30 CET

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@nprofile…55vq plus the barrier to entry for that is REALLY low. not remotely true for 3d worlds tho

2026-03-21 08:27:10 CET

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@nprofile…55vq like, the textuality of the web means it comes across as a publishing platform, and thats what a LOT of people use it for. early websites had lots of written content, then blogs came along. as a purpose, "publishing things for cheap" is a great one

2026-03-21 08:07:51 CET

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@nprofile…55vq the early web was fairly empty and dead too. finding information and shopping were some pretty major drivers of use, and then forums, art, publishing, etc.
but the web is a different kind of medium, and purposes there are different sorts

2026-03-21 08:06:11 CET

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so why when you put a headset on do many people get sick? have we actually sat down and determined the fine cuts that have to be made to induce that? i've never found anything explaining the distinction, nor anyone even grappling with that weird disconnect

2026-03-21 08:05:07 CET

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people spend hours and hours and hours playing video games on monitors, with all sorts of in-game movement that doesn't correspond to their body movement, and they don't get sick. they move their heads around a whole bunch and nothing, no sickness

2026-03-21 08:02:03 CET

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also, no one has really addressed the nausea problem in a satisfactory way
and i dont mean that they haven't fixed it, i mean they haven't actually grappled with the giant mystery of why it even happens at all, because it obviously SHOULDNT

2026-03-21 07:59:59 CET

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a 200 dollar headset that was JUST a display, and you used it by sitting at your computer and used your mouse and keyboard, would be the most popular VR system, i bet. make it a small delta over normal games and start from there

2026-03-21 07:58:42 CET

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even the VR that tries to be useful for games tries to be unnecessarily divergent from them. instead of just goggles in place of monitors, you have to have a whole huge room scale hand held yadda yadda bullshit, which means everything is now suddenly a whole ordeal

2026-03-21 07:57:34 CET

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this is why games and game-like social spaces persist as the dominant form of virtual environments
VR that tries to be vastly different fails and fails

2026-03-21 07:56:16 CET

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people turn to these things for escape, but being dumped into a world where you have to be the entire reason is not escape, it's a burden. giving people an option for purpose is valuable

2026-03-21 07:55:14 CET

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video games have always understood that purpose is key. even the smallest purpose like gold farming is a draw. but a blank canvas of a world is .. daunting? overwhelming? people don't know what to do with themselves

2026-03-21 07:55:10 CET

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@nprofile…kep0 i keep replying to you accidentally while trying to add versions of these ideas back into the main thread lmfao sorry

2026-03-21 07:54:37 CET

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@nprofile…kep0 video games have always understood that purpose is key. even the smallest purpose like gold farming is a draw. but a blank canvas of a world is .. daunting? overwhelming? people don't know what to do with themselves

2026-03-21 07:53:36 CET

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the fundamental issue is purpose. most VR stuff is completely purposeless. a void where you must supply your own reason to be there. sometimes the novelty of 3D immersion is the purpose, but that wears out quickly